Information Overload!

Help! What next? Image by Mrs Magic via Flickr

I admitted it aloud recently to a good friend. I’m reaching a point, which in some ways is exciting, of overload. I don’t even have kids or pets, but face so many choices and decisions it’s hard to know where to prioritize, focus and begin.

Right now, these include:

finishing and hopefully selling the proposal for my third book

opening and stocking my Etsy shop, AtlasoftheHeart

planning and marketing a writing workshop for next January in New Mexico

creating the photo book I began back in March at the Banff Springs Hotel

starting the proposal for my fourth book

getting “Malled” sold to some overseas markets

planning and executing a fund-raising campaign for a writers’ charity whose board I belong to

reaching out to new freelance clients to line up more work

following up with several amazing people I’ve recently met, with whom I hope to work

connecting on LinkedIn with all 65 people I just met at the retail conference I spoke at

following up in detail with three or four of them on a specific idea we discussed

finding more local speaking engagements for “Malled”

seeking and setting up readings and events for “Malled”

seeking and finding blogs on which to write guest posts to promote it

trying to repair — do I want to? — the non-speaking relationship with my mother

losing more weight so I can (shriek) schedule my hip replacement surgery

seeking and finding more paid venues at which to speak about “Malled”

staying in touch with friends worldwide

reading for pure pleasure

reading for book proposal research

long afternoons sitting with a good friend face to face

meeting new business contacts

mining my Facebook and LinkedIn connections

answering LinkedIn questions to stay visible within that community

choosing which cultural events like ballet, concerts, dance, theater to attend and getting tickets

staying in touch with several friends facing health issues, one whose Mom is quite ill

dealing more thoughtfully with my investments

Whew!

And that’s not even including writing this blog and responding to the many interesting people who comment.

The New York Times recently ran an interesting essay on the current paucity of “big ideas”, based on the current Niagara of data we have no time to thoughtfully absorb or process:

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information.

Here’s a thought-provoking list of possible things to reply to from Seth Godin’s blog.

How do you handle or manage all the data and demands coming at you, personally and professionally?

Got Time To Read This? Two Meditations On How We (Should) Use Our Hours

Image via Wikipedia

My favorite weekly read is the weekend FT, and its columnists. One, a 48-year-old executive named Mrs. Moneypenny, bristling with an MBA and Phd, a woman who refers to her three children in print as Cost Centres #1, #2 and #3, says every hour of her business time — and is there any other for the high-flying exec? — is worth 3,000 pounds — about $4,440. She dares not waste a minute and never takes vacation.

But a recent 360 review by her staff suggests she should “waste” some time posthaste:

The general consensus is that the pace at which I work and the number of things I take on alarms my colleagues, who believe it has the potential to be counterproductive. Above all, they fear for my health – and that is a commonly held view, not merely one aired by two or three people. So yes, perhaps I ought to slow down a little. And to show how willing I am to change, the very same week I was presented with these comments I had lunch at the Wolseley with a former Master of the Universe.

Normally, I hate lunch appointments, believing them to be a mammoth waste of time. If you include travelling time, it is likely to take up two hours, or a £6,000 opportunity cost to my business. But this MOTU was too charming to refuse. He pointed me in the direction of John Updike’s poem “Midpoint”, written at the end of his 35th year. I only ever read fiction and poetry when I’m on holiday – doing so at any other time is an extravagance (especially at £3,000 an hour). But after an hour with this guy, I would have tackled Plato in the original had he suggested it. The final lines of the poem read: “Born laughing, I’ve believed in the Absurd, / Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can, / I must impersonate a serious man.”

I am 48, not 35, and maybe it is time to start being serious.

Laura Vanderkam, another driven urban woman — mother of two small children, sings in a choir, attends church, runs every day — has written a new book called 168 Hours, the number of hours every fresh week offers us, if we would just stop wasting it.

I have mixed feelings about this notion of “wasted” time. I love the Italian phrase farniente -- literally — “do nothing” and aspire to a life with far more undirected time. I also love the British expression for day-dreaming — wool-gathering. We all need time to fantasize and imagine, to stare into the sky and let our weary, overcaffeinated brains….chill.

Last week, the sweetie and I took a vacation and drove to Quebec where we stay at a lovely, small, quiet lakeside hotel. Our plan of “action”? Eat, sleep, read, take photos, repeat. Plus a little antiquing — where the local shopowner remembered me from our last visit 3.5 years ago — and an hour’s canoeing.

This morning, (and it’s 9:11 as I write this on a glorious sunny June Saturday), I’ve: read 1.5 newspapers, watered the plants, made and consumed coffee and toast, blogged, washed the kitchen floor, discussed what paint we need to paint our terrace door. That’s in less than two hours. Yesterday, racing to finish my book, I worked at the computer for about 10 hours — I thought my eyeballs would melt.

I’m whipped and already ready for a nap. (And, no, I have no pets or kids, so my time is my own.)

Rest. Relax. Recharge. Restore. Revive. I think we all need more of it, and less of this boot-camp, finger-wagging instruction in efficiency. I plan to make highly efficient carefully-monitored use of my time when I am dead. I’ll have so much more of it anyway.

Do you waste time? What do you do with it? Do you think we should all be productive and organized all the time?

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Slow Down, You Move Too Fast…

Image by givepeasachance via Flickr

Simon and Garfunkel sang it on Bookends, their classic 1968 album. However deeply unfashionable, it’s worth trying, especially now there are so many harried, frenzied ways to save time — often leaving us too depleted to to enjoy it.

This year, we re-did the bathroom, our only one, after 20 years of putting up with a nasty, shallow tub that always left my knees cold. Now our tub is 21 inches deep, the deepest you can buy. When it’s full, the water completely covers my shoulders. The challenge is filling it, a process that takes at least 20 minutes. It’s so slow. It takes so much time. That’s exactly one of the reasons I like it so much, the anticipation of that pleasure equal to the pleasure itself.

I don’t own a microwave oven and never have. I know all the reasons it’s a great thing, but there’s no room for one in my tiny galley kitchen. I don’t miss its artificial haste a bit; you can re-heat or cook many foods in 10 to 20 minutes using a cooktop or oven. As important to me as the additional space is the additional time this forces into my day and my thinking. It slows me down. Experience has taught me that getting so hungry I can’t wait to eat is unhealthy and likely to provoke me into shoving whatever’s closest into my mouth. Eating should be something you enjoy, not just re-filling the fuel tank.

I hate rushing. I hate being rushed. I’m not a slowpoke, have almost never missed even the most difficult work-related deadline, even with pneumonia, and can get dressed and out the door within minutes. But time constantly compressed into false urgency makes me crazy. I attended a boarding school where our every day was set to bells — 6:55 wake-up, 7:05 walk around the block, 7:25 breakfast. Living by their pre-set clock meant hurrying through the potentially pleasurable activities of waking slowly and calmly, dressing leisurely, walking mindfully and appreciatively. The need for speed was audible, relentless, daily. Horrible!

It’s how most of us live without — literally — hesitation.